NEW DELHI: An Air India flight taken by Trinamool Congress MPs from Kolkata to come to New Delhi for Parliament session has made minister of state Dinesh Trivedi shoot off a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh criticising safety of the national carrier.

Mr Trivedi has written a two-page letter pointing out how the staff, including pilots, cabin crew and even ground staff, are over-worked making them quite prone to errors. In his letter Mr Trivedi has said, "I want to bring to your notice the precarious condition in which our national airlines Air India is in, which was earlier the pride of our nation."

Trinamool Congress MPs had taken an Air India flight on Sunday to reach the Capital before US President Barak Obama's address in Parliament on Monday. The plane, which starts as a domestic flight from New Delhi to Kolkata comes back as an international flight from Kolkata to New Delhi, was flown by captain A K Mohan.

Mr Trivedi has said in the letter that captain Mohan was on his way to Hyderabad for a pilot's refresher course when he was suddenly taken off the flight and asked to fly the plane from New Delhi to Kolkata and back. According to Trinamool Congress MPs, what caught their attention was that captain Mohan was clad in T-shirt and jeans inside the cockpit.

As passengers started asking the cabin crew, they found that even the crew had been pulled off from other flights and was quite obviously overworked. Mr Trivedi has said that norms are being flouted by Air India that is unnecessarily pressurising its staff. As the flight landed in New Delhi, passengers had to wait for over 30 minutes before the plane could reach the parking bay as the operator using hand signals was not available.

Pointing out these instances, the minister of state for health and family welfare has said that corrective measures needed to be taken to improve the functioning of the "ailing" national carrier. The minister has also said that he has been receiving a lot of complaints from the pilot fraternity that they are being made to report for duty by Air India management even when they are unwell.

Referring to the recent Mangalore air crash in which 158 people were killed, Mr Trivedi has requested the Prime Minister to step in to improve the condition so that the national carrier does not compromise with safety guidelines.